Intimations of mortality

I was teaching something pre-Gilgamesh, all about mortality. We were sitting at desks, loosely arranged in the classroom. A student in the far corner of the room began to freak out: she said that she was realizing that she was going to die.

“We’re all dying,” I said. “Every day brings us closer to death, and I’m further down the road than you are. But at the same time, we’re living. All of us, we’re all living.”

I looked at the clock, and it was ten past the hour. We had run twenty minutes over. And there was no class waiting to get in the room, and nobody in my class had made a move to leave.

A possible influence on this dream: mortality, duh. But also a moment when a student told me she had been unable to sleep all night after reading Philip Larkin’s “Aubade.” My words in the dream jibe with the poem.

I remember finding “Aubade” in the Times Literary Supplement and xeroxing copies for Jim Doyle and myself. The publication of this poem was something of an event — Larkin had more or less stopped writing, or at least publishing — and I remember walking into a class Jim was teaching to give him a copy, hot off the copy machine.

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An influence that I overlooked: watching Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948), with a tubercular yakuza, living while dying.

This is the thirtieth teaching dream I’ve had since retiring in 2015. It’s only the second such dream in which nothing has gone wrong. The other: teaching a novel with a cover price of $69.95. I don’t consider it wrong if a student has a strong response to a work of literature. Nor do I consider it wrong to run twenty minutes over with an attentive and willing group of students, so long as there’s no one waiting to get into the room.

Related reading
All OCA teaching dreams (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951).]